Comment

People

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday February 1 2006

In an item in the column below we said the BBC World Service soap Westway had had an estimated 150 millions fans around the world. It is no longer broadcast on the World Service. In an earlier correction (June 6, last year), we said that the BBC's research indicated an audience of 1.7 million. The BBC has reminded us of that.

A campaigning bunch of possibly insomniac MPs, including Frank Dobson, Joan Ruddock and Peter Bottomley, are doing their best to breathe new life into Westway, the World Service soap recently killed off by the BBC.

To some UK listeners, every episode of the health centre drama heard sometime in the night between Sailing By and the Radio 4 theme was a dreadful reminder that they were awake while everyone else was asleep. Plots circling round the agonies and ecstasies of GPs and staff in west London creaked liked the sets in Crossroads and could rarely be remembered even by insomniacs when dawn came. But mock not: Westway had an estimated 150 million fans around the world and the three MPs are among a group of more than 20 who have signed an early day cross-party Commons motion, put down by Labour MP Ann Keen, expressing their dismay.

Good news for the Church of England as it agonises over homosexuality: a member of the clergy is getting married. To a woman. And he is no humble vicar but a bishop: the Rt Rev Alistair Redfern (recreations: reading and walking). Bishop Redfern is keeping his nuptials within the CofE: he is to marry Caroline Boddington, secretary for appointments to the archbishops of Canterbury and York, at St Luke's, Chelsea, in May. They will live at the bishop's house in Duffield, Derbyshire.

Penelope Wilton, an actor with a long stage career, has won new fame as the prime minister in Dr Who. (Previous television roles include a wonderful Homily in a 1992 BBC dramatisation of Mary Norton's The Borrowers.) Last year she was with the National Theatre in The House of Bernarda Alba and now she is off to tread the boards with the other lot: next month she will be at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Swan theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, playing Livia in Women Beware Women, one of those early 17th century plays lots of English undergraduates read but rarely see.

The University of Bolton, the UK's newest, has built a reputation for bringing writers and poets to the town which may give the England football team its new manager. The spring line-up at Bolton's Octagon theatre includes both Simon Armitage, whose play Jerusalem was staged last year at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, and novelist Maggie Gee. Jackie Kay, whose novel Trumpet won the Guardian fiction prize in 1998, whose poetry collection Life Mask was published last year and who has a short story collection due this year, will be in Bolton in March.